With its broken boiler and dust-caked wheels, it may look like a worn-out relic from a bygone era, but don’t make that mistake about the museum that has cared for the 118-year-old farm vehicle since 1992. The 50-acre ranch is thriving and ever-expanding, with 1,400 volunteers at the ready and a budget that finishes each year in the black.

Started in 1976 on a county-owned parcel of land on North Santa Fe Avenue, the museum began as a place where members of the California Early Days Engine and Tractor Association could celebrate their love of historic farm equipment and farm life.

There’s also a bandstand, old-fashioned farm house, Western village, playground, restaurants, meeting hall, campground, grist mill and two acres of sorghum and wheat that are harvested to grind and thresh for school and tour groups. Still to come will be a working winery building and a space to house a recently donated collection of antique spinning wheels.

Longtime museum director Rod Groenewold, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, said people are always wide-eyed with surprise on their first visit to the museum for events like this weekend’s Vista Fiber Arts Fiesta, which runs Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 12 and 13, ﻿or the Fall Antique Engine and Tractor Show, which runs Oct. 19-20 and 26-27.

Members of the Museum Weavers guild work on looms in the weaving barn at the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum in Vista on Oct. 10. The guild is hosting the free Vista Fiber Art Fiesta from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 12 and 13 at the museum at 2040 N. Santa Fe Ave. CREDIT: Pam Kragen

Members of the Museum Weavers guild work on looms in the weaving barn at the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum in Vista on Oct. 10. The guild is hosting the free Vista Fiber Art Fiesta from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 12 and 13 at the museum at 2040 N. Santa Fe Ave. CREDIT: Pam Kragen

“The hard part is getting them on the property,” said Groenewold. “They see that we’re doing a threshing bee and they say ‘ho-hum,’ but once they’re here and they have a look around, they’re hooked.”

In the early years, the museum was a popular spot for older transplants from the Midwest who grew up on farms and missed the simple pleasures of rural life. Today, the museum’s membership includes teenage boys who like repairing old engines, a waiting list of adults eager to learn smithing in a 4-month apprenticeship, and the many women and men artists in the weavers group who create tapestries, rugs and other fiber art in a huge barn filled with antique looms dating to the pre-Civil War era.

The nonprofit museum operates on a $500,000 budget that’s entirely self-funded through memberships and ticket sales to its large on-property events. The Fiber Fiesta pulls in 4,000 people each year, the twice-yearly tractor attracts nearly 3,000 a day, and last month’s bluegrass festival drew more than 8,000. The museum also makes money running a tractor-pulled wagon ride each spring at The Flower Fields in Carlsbad, and regularly hosts local school and tour groups.

Marion Francis, the museum’s volunteer fundraising director, said members not only donate money, they also refurbish equipment, adopt tractors they can ride in tractor parades and they volunteer thousands of hours of their time at events.